On the U.S.-Iran alliance: Is the Iranian nuclear threat overblown?

George Friedman, founder and head of Stratfor, sometimes ID’d as “the private CIA,” is an unblinking observer of power politics. In the March 21 issue of WORLD he predicts trouble in Europe. Surprisingly, he’s more phlegmatic about the Middle East and Iran in particular. Here are more of his thoughts from an interview conducted before students at Patrick Henry College.

Let’s take a quick world tour of the Middle East and points farther east. Turkey. Turkey is a Muslim country. It has tried to be a secular country, but given the dynamics of the Islamic world, simple secularism is hard to maintain. President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, a very smart and egotistical man, understands two things. First, the Arab world is in chaos. The second, ultimately it’s something Turkey has to deal with. It is the major power of the region. It can’t deal with it effectively if it’s simply a secular power. It has to somehow have the legitimacy of being an Islamic state. There is an enormously powerful secularist element in Turkish society. There is also an enormously powerful Muslim element that is on the ascendency, which does not mean Erdogan is a radical Islamist. He is actually a fairly cynical man, but he will use this to legitimate his regime and position Turkey as leader of the Islamic world.

Egypt. The eternal Egypt. It never changes up or down. Egypt is showing us that the Arab Spring was nonsense. The idea that the Arabs were repeating what the Eastern Europeans did in 1989 to create liberal democracies …

What were the differences? The Eastern European countries were occupied by a foreign power, and underneath everything else were Western European and liberal democratic. Opposing the secular military regime (you have to understand that Egypt was secular) were the Muslim Brotherhood, the religious. If you got very confused, you could think a bunch of Wisconsin liberals were demonstrating in the street. They were extensively interviewed by CNN—not being interviewed were the people who didn’t speak English who were Muslim Brotherhood and they tried to take power. But in fact the army had never given up power. You cannot overthrow a military unless the military splits. If the military remains intact, the power to destroy it is very difficult. In Egypt it remained intact. It backed off as if it had left power and got rid of [Hosni] Mubarak, who the military wanted to get rid of anyway. When the Muslim Brotherhood went too far, the military simply reasserted reality. Egypt is a secular militarist state that sees the Islamists as the threat to its existence.

Iran. Iran is ultimately a democratic country in the sense that the government is actually popular. Not in the sense that anybody loves it or is enthusiastic, and in 2009 there was an uprising called the Green Revolution. Everybody interviewed the demonstrators outside the university. This is as representative as if Harvard University were demonstrating and that was taken to represent the views of Arkansas. It was kind of crazy, but Iran is also a very sophisticated country. Iran understands that it is facing Turkey and an Arab world that’s in chaos, and it remembers the war fought with Iraq from 1980 to 1988 and of course the million causalities. Iranians thought that with the Americans leaving their government would now dominate Iraq, and it’s discovered quite the contrary. The Sunnis are back in force. This makes Iran extremely nervous. I don’t think it ever really had a serious nuclear program. I think it was playing the North Korean game, having a program to be able to negotiate it away. And now we find ourselves in the interesting position where the Iranian air force is flying airstrikes against the Islamic State in coordination very quietly with the United States, which proves that all ideology aside, interests coincide and people switch sides. Iran’s problem is that it’s fallen so far behind Turkey, and it’s really falling behind countries like Azerbaijan, so unless it gets back into the game it is going to face serious problems. The Iranians have faced the fact that this can’t go on. They are moving to a relationship with the United States. The U.S. no longer wants to be in the Middle East. It wants a balance of power between the Shiite power and the Saudis, for example, and the Turks. So right now a strong conventional Iran is in the American interest. An alliance reversal is underway, and I suspect this will happen because our option is to remain occupying Iraq—or we can create a balance of power between powers we don’t particularly care for.

Iran is not close to getting a bomb? Enriching uranium does not give you a bomb. This is very important to understand. A missile-delivered nuclear bomb has to go up in a rocket, go 10 Gs full of vibrations, go to vacuum, then in seconds it changes temperature plus or minus 500, then reenters the atmosphere at 5,000 degrees and explodes. If it doesn’t explode this is very bad because it would land in the middle of Tel Aviv and if it says made in Iran on the back of a rocket, that is not good for Iran. So seriously, it’s a risk for the Iranians. It’s a very difficult thing to carry out. I think the Israelis understand that the probability of a missile is low and the time to attack it is when it is placed on the rocket. Israelis have satellites and the Americans have satellites. It’s much easier to blow something up in a gantry when it’s being mounted than underground. So the Iranians know this, and they also know that if they destroy Tel Aviv they might dance for one or two nights, but there will be consequences. They also would very much like to become a modern industrial state and not stay in the condition that they have been taken into. So there are a lot of reasons why I think Israel doesn’t have to fear them, although it is rational to fear them. You never know what anyone will do and it’s perfectly useful for the Israelis to fear them.

And the consequences then will come from Israel or the United States? I think it will come from both and it could come from either. If there were a nuclear attack in Israel, the Israelis have nuclear submarines available. But there are plenty of warning signs of the potential of a nuclear attack. They give plenty of time to act and you don’t need days. So you can’t hide a rocket that’s about to be launched. You can detect to some extent radioactive material that’s being transferred to it. You will have test blasts. Those things haven’t happened yet and therefore since we’ve been predicting for years now this is going to happen and you reach the point where you realize they’ve learned the game from North Korea to use this to bluff.

Afghanistan. It is possible that the thing we called the Taliban won’t come to power. It is not possible that Islamists will not control Afghanistan because Afghanistan is an Islamist state. The real question is what Pakistan is going to do. In many ways the Taliban was created by Pakistan after the United States left. Pakistan is the giant. Afghanistan is the midget. Pakistan is still involved and getting very nervous about what it created. So I suspect that Pakistan is going to try to reshape it, but a pro-Western secular government, it is not going to happen.